Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) Ranking Member James Inhofe (R-Okla.) wants to create a $16 billion fund to help the Pentagon offset unintended costs the “sequestration” budget cuts could trigger.
Inhofe offered an amendment to the Senate Budget Resolution on Friday–during a “vote-a-rama” on hundreds of amendments to the nonbinding measure–that would create an emergency Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) fund “to address irrecoverable impacts on the Department of Defense incurred as a result of sequestration.”
“One thing that has not been observed is that it’s a possibility that some of the things that are on there designed to be done (because of sequestration cuts) will actually cost more money,” Inhofe said on the Senate floor Friday afternoon, hours before the chamber launched into a multi-hour period of voting on hundreds of amendments to the budget resolution.
He cited Pentagon Comptroller Robert Hale saying that sequestration–the $500 billion in decade-long, across-the-board spending reductions that started March 1–could force officials to “disrupt as many as 2,500 investment programs, driving up costs at the very same time that we’re trying to hold them down.”
“In other words, he says that particular part of this could actually cost more than the cuts,” Inhofe said.
The SASC Republican leader said multiple Pentagon officials have said their costs will rise because of sequestration, which he argued will “result in far more taxpayer money wasted than saved.”
“Services such as the Marine Corps will be forced to mortgage their future to pay for readiness needs today, assuming even larger future financial obligations without the resources to address them,” Inhofe in a written statement. “Other branches warn of having to forgo modernization of equipment that goes to support our deployed forces.”
His amendment would create the $16 billion emergency fund to address any “irrecoverable” impacts on the military strategy and readiness levels resulting from sequestration, he said.
The Senate had not voted on the measure at press time Friday. If the Senate accepted the amendment, Inhofe said he and SASC Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) would work to find a way to “define the appropriate mechanism” for including it in the fiscal year 2014 defense authorization act that the SASC will write in June.
The White House and many in Congress oppose sequestration but cannot agree on a plan to stop it. The sequestration cuts for FY ’13, until Sept. 30, are projected to be $46 billion. The budget resolution the Democratic-led Senate debated on Friday, in fact, called for stopping the $500 billion in defense sequestration cuts and replacing them with $240 billion in alternate Pentagon reductions. The dueling budget resolution the House passed last Thursday is more generous to the Pentagon, and calls for technically keeping sequestration but adding $500 billion to defense to offset the reduction.
The House and Senate resolutions are vastly different from each other, and in reality do not firmly dictate federal spending.
The House plan calls for balancing the federal deficit over the decade with $4.6 billion in spending cuts, a Medicare overhaul, and cancellation of parts of President Barack Obama’s health-care reform. The Senate proposal–as approved by the Senate Budget Committee–seeks $975 billion in new tax revenues along with $975 billion in budget cuts and $100 billion in stimulus spending, and would not attempt to balance the budget.
Inhofe said the $16 billion fund he wants to create related to defense sequestration cuts would be considered emergency-supplemental funding that can be approved without waiting for a defense appropriations bill to pass. It would not impact the deficit, he said.
Inhofe and Levin have requested that the Senate Budget Committee increase the Pentagon’s base budget by up to 3 percent.
However, Pentagon spending in recent years has been more-directly dictated by the defense authorization and appropriations bills.